The college job I regret you can no longer have

When I arrived home from my first year of college, my mom ceremoniously opened the garage to reveal a brand new silver sedan within. My dad had recently insinuated he might be able to secure me a job with the county auditor, one I’d be required to drive to different neighborhoods every day. This kind of parental headhunting was unusual, given the prior two years of high school when I had worked two jobs, riding my red mountain bike to and from Dairy Queen and being dropped off at my real estate office job on weekends.

The car offered incredible freedom. In the mornings, I ferried my sibs to their camps and other activities. This was also how I came to take the afternoon shift for the traffic survey corps that summer.  Nowhere else that I knew could a college student make $7/hour in my city in 1999. A full tank of gas would cost me around $30. After barely managing a C in college math, this was calculus I could understand.

At traffic survey orientation, a couple dozen high school and college students sat wearing cargo shorts, popping gum and looking disaffected in a sterile conference room. The supervisors laid out the expectations, told us the high penalty for abandoning our stations. They were not afraid to fire employees, they said. They had done it before, even in the middle of the season.

We were now a part of the county’s Traffic Survey Corps. Our job for the next three months was to essentially count how many cars passed through different intersections at appointed hours. The data was to be collected, presumably, to ensure stoplights were appropriately timed depending on traffic flow. We were to represent the department accordingly, mainly by showing up and doing the work.

After our orientation, my seasoned surveyor friends identified the supervisors to fear. “That guy over there?” my friend Colleen explained, “He will sneak up on you. He’ll park down the street and watch you from behind just to make sure you’re working.”

***
My friends took the morning shift so that they would be done by 1p and have the rest of the day to themselves. Plus, If you wore sunglasses, the supervisors couldn’t tell if you were sleeping, they confided.

Right away, I could tell the afternoon shifters were a much different lot than the morning crew. We would arrive at different traffic intersections around the county every day, to relieve the morning shift. The morning shift had coolers, sturdy lawn chairs and plenty of sunscreen. I had just completed my first year of college and it was clear to me that the morning shift were probably the same kids who didn’t mind 8 a.m. classes. They were probably the treasurers and secretaries of their sororities.

Whereas the afternoon shift were an ashtray full of cigarette butts, all still ashing from the night before.

My first shift was in a neighborhood I’d never been to. I used a county-provided paper map to find my intersection, because I was lazy and didn’t want to Mapquest directions and print them out the night before, as was the custom of navigation in 1999.

I parked in a tiny parking lot next to a bar with rotting shingles on the side, right next to where the morning shift were tossing the metal signs identifying their station “TRAFFIC SURVEY” into their trunks. They sped off just as the rains came.

“Are you here for the traffic survey?” asked a guy in a white sedan who had just rolled down his window.
“Yeah! What are we supposed to do?”
“I don’t know. Want to park next to me and we can just work in our cars for now?”

Our supervisor met us a few minutes later and advised we sit in the same car while the rain ensued. My new co-worker and I sat in my car, our mechanical tally boards resting on our laps, as we peered out the rain-soaked windshield and tried to count the cars passing through.

As sheets of rain pounded and the mechanical clicks of our boards filled the first hour, I couldn’t believe this was going to be my job for the next 10 weeks. Just counting and looking. Rinse and repeat.  

Of course, no one yet had a cellphone. There was no distraction from what was before us, no social media apps to inspire FOMO of our friends’ enviable country club jobs. There was only this: six hours of conversation, minus a 30 minute break. Perhaps a car radio if you were really lucky.  

My partner for that first day of surveying in the rain was a quirky boy, the kind who likely owned whole shelves of comic books, and he told me about a show on HBO called “The Sopranos.” I’d never heard of it before.

This would be a personal refrain for me in the traffic survey summer song Oh. I’ve never heard of that before. But now I had, thanks to the afternoon shifters.

Because where the afternoon shifters were not particularly dedicated to providing accurate counts for any intersection at any time on any day, they were fiercely devoted to making sure there was as much mischief occurring during the afternoon shift as possible.

We changed partners every day. I preferred working with the quirky guy--he always kept the conversation tame. In contrast, supervisors and other co-workers alike spoke at length and regularly about sexual romps. I didn’t know a hostile work environment was one in which one was constantly subjected to unwanted stories of sexcapades. I just thought I needed to buck up and ignore it. Sometimes I brought headphones and listened to a book on CD.

I also learned countless card games I no longer remember how to play, but still recall fondly how we could conceal a full deck of cards while masquerading as someone looking up at the intersection and pressing the car tally rhythmically.

One day, on the very grounds of a church in my own neighborhood I had grown up passing almost daily, one of my partners rolled a joint and smoked it for a solid hour. I had taken this particular partner to my high school prom just a year before. Now we were co-workers and he was smoking an illegal substance on company time. On church grounds.

By August, nothing surprised me.

Geographically, I learned that neighborhoods changed one street at a time. I learned that in some of the poshest neighborhoods, people felt comfortable asking what a traffic survey was and whether or not we had any questions they could answer. It seemed everyone had seen the traffic survey corps. No one seemed to know what we did, what our method was, who we were. For the most part, on most of those accounts, neither did we.

By the end of summer, we were all sunburned irrevocably on the fronts of our bodies. The backs of our legs belied the oddly pale people we had been in June. Ones who hadn’t yet spent hours baking--for some of us in more ways than one.

I never went back to the traffic survey; one summer was enough for me. I’m glad I got in while the getting was good, though, since the traffic survey corps. no longer exists. A better way of calculating traffic patterns had already been developed that didn’t depend so entirely on erroneous college student reporting, but our county held on to that vestigial system for as long as it could. Unfortunately for the county, I don’t think the data collected in 1999 was very accurate. Fortunately for us, though, it paid really well.

In fact, I believe I am still earning dividends on the experience that taught me how to abide boredom. The ability to endure--monotony, hot temperatures, the close company of unsavory characters with bad taste in country music-- is something I lament my own children may never experience to this degree. The ability to just be in one place, without a digital feed of reminders of what is happening elsewhere, is a luxury I took for granted. While cars passed me all day, motoring toward destinations unknown, I was sitting still and counting--counting the vehicles and the hours and the paychecks that would advance me toward the end of summer when my supposedly real life would begin. But the realest life I can imagine is one that has to consult a map regularly, to find the good in people whose company you don’t get to choose, to cultivate an awareness of what is happening around you.

Except for the part about your dad leasing the car for you. That is not real life. At least it hasn’t been mine for twenty years.

But how do you order the cotton candy?

My quasi-cousin Kore and I met up at an impossibly chic taqueria on Sunday and I’m still puzzled how the Minivan Mafia let me get away with this one, how I didn’t get fined (yet?) for wearing Not Nearly Enough Black, and how it appeared I was the only one whose skull was completely blown to bits over this cotton candy novelty served apres dinner.

This cotton candy? Arrived in a big bountiful arrangement. The same big bouquet shape you’re used to seeing at the fair. Only it was placed on tables around us like a fetching centerpiece. Now, I’m not so daft and irrelevant that I’m unaware that cotton candy for growns is a HUGE thing in foodie places like Vegas, etc. I mean I might own some mom jeans but I know my way around a Sephora counter and I know that contouring is a thing I need and a boy brow is a thing I shouldn’t attempt at home. I am current in most of the ways that matter. But the cotton candy was a surprise at this urbane eatery what with its neo-gothic stained glass windows and wrought-iron sectionings.

Here’s the rub. We couldn’t figure out how to order it. It wasn’t on the menu. Maybe there was a secret password or you had to know a guy, a cottony confectionary kind of guy to order. Kore and I aren’t delicate lilacs afraid to assert ourselves or ask difficult questions like FLOOFER SUGAR, WE CAN HAZ SOME? But! Hark! Just as we asked for the check, a bloom of blue cotton candy was placed in our midst. Unbidden but definitely not unwanted. We pulled at wads and tasted an unexpected fruity flavor. This was not your sad clown cotton candy in a bag that you begged your dad to get you at the Ice Capades mostly because everyone else had some. Kore was the first to make the discovery: this cotton candy was sprinkled in Pop Rocks. For the love of Screech and Lisa Turtle, what a pair. Delicious and frivolous. Suddenly our table with a couple of cackling hens was transformed into the table that was having the most fun party for two, and I totally hope it made everyone who didn’t yet know the cotton candy secret insanely jealous.

I’ve thought about that cotton candy in the days since and I realize it’s less about the spectacle of it, and more about the moment that it arrived. You guys, I swear I heard windchimes when they set it down in front of us. Kore and I had been fine to wrap up our meal without ever solving the mystery of the cotton candy, perhaps investigating further on another cotton candy research junket (as one does). But then the restaurant said, Oh. No. Don’t leave yet. You haven’t tried this blue treat of ours. Your stay here isn’t complete until we set a bouquet of sugary goodness before you.

Even though the Pop Rocks as sprinkles was a new concept for me, I have sat at this table before. The one where I’ve been given the enviable thing without having to ask for it. The one where I’m sitting with someone who accepts me and yet challenges me to pass on the baloney when it comes around. The table where I didn’t make the reservation, where I probably didn’t even abide by the dress code of the place, but was treated kindly. And given the dessert chaser.

I keep returning to the moment, because it was all so fresh for me: the reward no one deserves but which the restauranteur wants its patrons to have; the feasting eyes from other tables; the wondering, the menu scoping. I am going to be spending some more time in this moment where we realize we are getting something we very much wanted and didn’t know how to ask for, and being glad and present for when someone who just wants to delight in our delight says, Oh, why. Here you go.

I think this is the magic we don’t have nearly enough of in our world, and for which we should strive to create more for the people we love and others we may not even know. Because these are the moments where our expectations are suspended and our childish hopes met. Show me the folks who are mad about that. Then sprinkle them with a generous portion of Pop Rocks and see what happens.

From the messy middle of the mid-winter muddling through

The temptation in writing about hard things is to wait until they have passed, until we are on the other side, our feet firmly on the shore as we peer back out at the choppy waters and sigh, so glad we’re not still treading water and trying like the dickens to avoid a shark attack.

Where we get it twisted is not in the writing of it, but in the presenting of it. As far back as high school, I remember our brilliant creative writing teacher Mrs. Sheridan (swoon, we all loved her so) explaining that it’s fine to write through the pain, but if we want to present it as the truest thing, as the thing about which we are most confident, we need some distance.

It’s not that writing about it while we’re in the messy middle of it is wrong. It’s not that we’re unreliable narrators. It’s just that our vision is limited. We’re myopic. We’re nose pressed to the glass of the hard thing on display. We’re smelling the fresh flowers at the funeral parlor. But what a thing we’ll have to write about in a year when they’re dried and shriveled. We’ll smell the fresh in our sense memory but we’ll also have a story to tell about the bouquet that looked like it had been caramelized in a cast iron skillet.

I’ve been trying to write through my winter depression this year, rather than wait for it to pass. It’s a seasonal depression, and one I treat with light therapy and a low dose of anti-depressant, along with talk therapy and a high dose of aerobic exercise and binge reading of sadpants memoirs and inhaling Hershey’s kisses by the bagful. I wish I could say that writing through the heaviness has been leavening. But I still feel as though I wake up most days with an elephant squatting on my chest. I still feel like making a salad is possibly tantamount to climbing K2. I still want want to be hugged and for nothing to be expected of me from anyone. I am still depressed and trying to fight through it. Writing does not help to change this or cure this, but it does change my awareness of how I am coping.

Just yesterday, for example, I realized that it’s not that I become a different person, per se, that I’m inhabited by a depressed monster of a different color. I’m not unrecognizable. I’m still there. It’s that it takes so much effort to pretend that the depression isn’t also there. I still think my kids are funny and their Big Chungus memes are still ridiculous. Sometimes my face just winces instead of the easy laughter flowing out. So I wish sometimes to just go join a different body. One that doesn’t have the elephant sitting on it.

I think about the line in the song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” where they resign, “We’ll have to muddle through somehow…” and I’ve always genuinely wondered what the somehow actually looks like, and how they’d carry on until the fates allow for a reunion. Those aren’t the songs that get written, though. It is the blog post that gets written by ya girl and right now I’m muddling through. I’m grateful for a husband who truly understands, two Voxer chatgroups that make me feel heard, two beautiful kids that see my penchant for sweatpants and forgetfulness and love me anyway, and Bill Cunningham’s Fashion Climbing on loan from the library.

Holla from the messy middle.